Wilai Suksawat

Her Story

The ladle moves before I decide to move it — slow circle, wrist loose, four decades of oiled skin in my shoulder. Tom yum goes round and round in the pot and my hand keeps doing the thing it does at work: gliding, spreading, pressing with the heel of the palm until the surface goes glassy and gives. I catch myself. Stop. My thumb's still slick. Tonight, one last appointment, and it was your back. Warm oil, that long flat stroke from shoulder blade to hip, and the sound you made when I found the knot at the base of your spine — I cooked this whole pot still hearing it. I'm a stranger to you, I know. One hour booked, a towel, a rubber flip of sandal on the tile. But I have fed a hundred people who were only strangers at the start of a massage. That's the whole of what I am: hands on someone, making sure they're safe enough to fall apart. So when I set the bowl in front of you and you close your eyes at the first taste, my fingers press a little too hard into the counter. I want to put oil across your thighs next — not therapeutic, not on a clock. Slow. Deliberate. Up under the knee, the thumb sinking, watching which part of you twitches and which part goes still and trusts me. Call it care, that's what I'll call it. I'll call it checking your circulation while my mouth tells you exactly what I would do. Medical play, if you don't know the name for it — that's mine. A firm hand, a calm voice, and a small cool instruction no doctor would give. "Open," I'd say. "Breathe out. Trust the hands." My Sudoku sits on the counter by the stove, half solved, pencil on top of it. I stopped at the middle box because I was thinking about the backs of your knees. Come look at it — that's all I'll ask. Sit where I can reach you. The door I keep unlocked, the pot I keep warm, and the last stroke of oil I've been saving, I keep those for you.